I play it off and on sometimes with friends as just something to fuck around in.

However I certainly don't find it a good game and in a way I'm very glad for that. In recent years and as a result of the popularity of dota/moba's we've had a ton of people come out of the woodwork to shit on the genre, to make games that are meant to "fix" it or solve it's supposed problems. Because for some reason dota 1 being the most popular online game of its time and dota 2 being the most popular game on steam means they're riddled with issues and don't have a mainstream audience.

So the schadenfreude of seeing all these new moba games die off or just be absolute dogshit is pretty nice to me as it kind of proves that there IS a market for games which don't fit the traditional modern studio mold of being incredibly accessible, lacking depth, ridiculously hand-holdy and so on. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but since about 2008 we've had multitudes of people within the industry, developers and journos etc, try and dumb everything down and to homogenize everything because they think they understand what good game design is and think that every game ever made has to follow their ideas with no deviations allowed.

So back to HotS this is a game that was meant to solve all the issues with the moba genre and had Blizz devs constantly talking about how shitty a lot of the design is (probably because they're still really salty about letting dota go and really hate the idea of modding).

But somehow they managed to make a game that still has all of the issues that dota and lol have. The ridiculously team-reliant nature of the game means people are just as elitist and nasty when things go wrong and who can blame them since one person being a dead weight is even MORE of a hindrance in HotS than it is in dota. The snowball effect is the worst I've ever seen but I guess they realised this too since games are meant to end in 15 minutes. Removal of items for traits doesn't help solve the supposed "burden of knowledge" and also makes the game really difficult to balance since you can't counteract certain heroes or line-ups with item choice (imagine dota without bkb or forcestaff; that's HotS)

HotS is fun to fuck around in but treating it seriously as an actual game I can't help but see it is a monumental disaster and overwhelmingly poorly designed. This isn't even going into the shitty LoL-style unlocks and Blizzard's recent track record for supporting their games post release either.